More Articles

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoTom Dodge | DispatchTruck driver Tony D. Smith, left, receives 180 days in jail in Franklin County Municipal Court for a May crash on I-70 that killed two women in other vehicles. Despite another trucker’s statement, subpoenaed records didn’t indicate that Smith was on his phone.

As Weslee Adams cruised down the road in Guernsey County one Sunday afternoon last spring, the
17-year-old flirted with his girlfriend through text messages.

“I love you,” she wrote at 4:21 p.m.

“I love you too,” he wrote back two minutes later.

“Good :)”

“Duh”

“Shush”

“Hehe”

“:))”

That last smiley face from his girlfriend came into his iPhone at 4:25 p.m. on April 21.

Four minutes later, Adams picked up the phone again, this time to call his dad after he had
driven across the centerline of Rt. 22 and slammed into a car carrying a woman and two little
girls.

He crawled out of his truck, checked out the carnage and ran back to his truck to call his
dad.

The woman driving the car, Jody Bice, 35, died. The two girls — Bice’s foster daughter and the
girl’s biological sister, who had spent the weekend — survived.

Prosecutors say that Adams acted recklessly by speeding and texting before the crash. They point
to the exchange of messages, the amount of time between the smiley face and the call to Adams’ dad,
the fact that Adams somehow wasn’t paying attention and drifted into Bice’s lane.

Judge Robert Moorehead said that prosecutors didn’t prove the texting contributed to the crash,
and that they didn’t show that Adams was recklessly speeding.

“The last text messages could have been two minutes prior to the collision, or it might’ve been
closer to the time of the collision,” Moorehead wrote in his December decision. The judge threw out
the charge of aggravated vehicular homicide, a felony, and found Adams delinquent — the
juvenile-court form of guilty — of vehicular homicide, a misdemeanor.

It means that when Adams, now 18, is sentenced on Tuesday in Cambridge, he’s more likely to get
some kind of probation than time in a juvenile facility.

“It’s difficult to prove that something you’re doing two, three minutes before the accident
contributed to the crash,” said Adams’ attorney, Zachary Swisher.

Proving that someone was distracted by a phone in a fatal crash is extremely difficult.
Cellphone records can be subpoenaed, but records can show only so much.

Investigators say it’s likely that many more people looking at their phones cause crashes than
are charged.

“You can receive texts all day long, but we’d have to demonstrate that you, the driver, are
interacting with them,” said Sgt. Brooke Wilson of the Columbus police accident-investigation
unit.

Showing that a driver was texting or otherwise intentionally distracted at the time of a fatal
crash could bump up the charge from a misdemeanor to a felony. But without proof of recklessness —
such as texting — the charge for killing someone while driving remains a misdemeanor.

That can be the difference between days in jail and years in prison.

In Franklin County, only one driver has been convicted of texting while driving and causing a
fatal crash: Daniel Jacobs is serving a 3 1/2-year prison sentence for aggravated vehicular
homicide.

Jacobs was texting when his car swerved off I-270 near Rt. 33 on the South Side and slammed into
a car parked on the berm on July 1, 2010. Dalton Ludwig, a 16-year-old driver’s-education student,
was killed, and his instructor was injured.

Jacobs told investigators that just before the crash, he was “messing with his phone.” That
admission allowed a subpoena of his phone records.

Investigators are limited in getting those records without probable cause, such as a driver
admission or witness statements.

“Even when suspected, the police can’t just grab the cellphone and go on a fishing expedition
for recent e-mails and/or texts,” Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien said in an email.

In many cases, a distraction can’t be proved.

Tony D. Smith was driving his tractor-trailer east on I-70 in western Franklin County on May 8
when he failed to notice stopped traffic ahead. He slammed into the vehicles, killing two women,
Diana L. Schwab, 71, of Beavercreek in Greene County, and Robin S. Jones, 48, of London in Madison
County.

Another semi driver told detectives with the Franklin County sheriff’s office that he had seen
Smith texting and speeding a few miles before the crash.

For some reason, Smith didn’t notice that traffic was stopped, but as far as records that
investigators subpoenaed showed, the reason wasn’t his phone.

He was sentenced on Thursday to 180 days in jail, the maximum for the two misdemeanor
convictions of vehicular manslaughter.

“I’d like to know what he was doing,” said Robin Jones’ husband, Jay Jones. “The phone shows
nothing.”

Even texts sent just seconds before a crash don’t always lead to a stronger charge.

In Marietta, investigators said a 23-year-old man was texting when he drove left of the
centerline and slammed into two vehicles, killing one of the other drivers.

Zachary Dumas voluntarily turned over his phone to State Highway Patrol troopers, who found that
he sent his last text less than a minute before the first 911 call was made by a passer-by that
morning, Sept. 16.

Washington County Assistant Prosecutor Kevin Rings said investigators believe Dumas’ texting led
him to miss the curve and cause the crash, but a grand jury said that action wasn’t reckless. The
panel rejected a charge of aggravated vehicular homicide, a felony, and indicted him on two
misdemeanor counts: vehicular homicide and vehicular manslaughter.

He is charged with one felony count — tampering with evidence — after investigators found that
he had deleted several text messages from his phone before handing it over to authorities. His
trial is set for March 19.

For the family of Jody Bice, who was killed in the Guernsey County crash in April, seeing the
tougher charge against Adams dropped is hard to stomach.

“He’s going to get away with it, basically,” said Bice’s sister, Kim Warner. “And he’s going to
think he didn’t do anything wrong.”